Over the years I had thought how ironic it would be when they executed “Lidocaine Killer” Robert Rubane Diaz by lethal injection. On August 11, 2010, Diaz, 72, died of natural causes on California’s death row. Dying of natural causes was a luxury he never afforded the dozen, helpless old people he murdered in their hospital beds by injecting them with lethal doses of the heart drug Lidocaine three decades ago in Riverside County.

I first made contact with Diaz in May 1981 when he was a 43-year-old registered nurse and I was a reporter for a daily newspaper in Riverside, California. I had gotten a tip that investigators searched his home in the Mojave Desert town of Apple Valley, California -- known then for its most famous residents, cowboy movie stars Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

I didn’t know as I stood at the front door of the ranch-style home Diaz had rented from a county politician that six months later the soft-spoken, cardiac care nurse would be charged with twelve first-degree murders in a case that made national headlines and plunged Southern California into a health care crisis.

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998.

Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: from organized crime to serial killers, from capital punishment to prisons, from historical crimes to celebrity crime, from assassinations to government corruption, from justice issues to innocent cases, from crime films to books about crime. Read More